And block satellite launchers or outlaw dishes, outlaw making little robotic router-fish to swim round the pacific running Freenet nodes, outlaw blimp relays, outlaw nanotech. Pretty soon, you'll have to outlaw everything, right down to carrier pigeons. And you'd have to do it internationally. It'd be madness,and sure, there's a small, but finite chance of that taking place, but it's a VERY samll chance.
I think you're missing the point. My post was talking about a rudimentary versioning system, as well as a trashcan. I don't use a script like that either, but I'm a lot more experienced than, say, my little brother.
An OPTIONAL trashcan would be a conceptual crutch that might make the novice a little more comfortable, while not getting in the way of real work. Combined with a version history, it could be quite useful.
The other implicit point which you didn't pick up on was that it'd be "the unix way" of happy little component tools chained together in user space to acheive the same end as some grandiose plan for a new filesystem.
How about making "gb" (garbage) or something a short script that moves files to a trashcan location, say/var/trash, cloning the directory hierarchy as it goes (i.e./var/trash/usr/ etc.)? If you want to be smart, make it deal with different types of files appropriately, and make sure that's it's got correct permission control. Then just train yourself to type "gb" instead of "rm", unless you really mean it. Schedule a cron job to delete the contents periodically, and/or make a script "emptytrash" that rm -rf/var/trash/*
It would be fairly trivial to extend this to/var/trash.n/ where n is the n-th previous "gb", so that each time you delete, it gets versioned out. The interaction could go, say:
$ echo "Jeans" >/home/david/pants
$ gb/home/david/pants
pants trashed. $ more/var/trash/home/david/pants
Jeans $ echo "Baggy" >/home/david/pants
$ gb/home/david/pants
pants trashed. $more/var/trash/home/david/pants
Baggy $more/var/trash.1/home/david/pants
Jeans
Have a ugb command to reverse the delete.
Yes, the idea needs work, and sounds space wasting, but HD space is cheap these days.
Finely ground pepper does tend to make me sneeze, if I inhale it gently. The pepper must be fine enough to float in the air, though, like a little dust cloud. Most pepper grinders produce far coarser particles.
In my experience, the sneeze effect of inhaled pepper dust floating in the air is comparable to that of inhaled mustard flour floating similarly, and far greater than that of chalk dust.
Just because something is open-source, doesn't mean that the Gov't *has* to use patches from J. Random Coder in its "official" tree. There's a spectrum of open source-ish licenses, but they have (at least) two important aspects in this discussion.
Disclosure of source:
You're taxes are paying for this stuff, remember, so you [should] have a right to see how the entire system works. There are several examples of disclosed-source proprietary licenses, which might be a middle ground for a government-mandated source disclosure programme and a rabidly anti-sharing anti-caring american-typical oligopolistic corporation.
Provision for forking/patching of source:
Your taxes have paid for this stuff, so you should be able to use the source. If you REALLY want to, you should be free to start your own tree based on the theirs, or, when you are using the code, apply you own patches. At the same time, that does not mean that the Gov't should necessarily incorporate every patch into its own source tree. e.g. Linus doesn't have to accept Linux patches from you, but, thanks to the GPL, he can't stop you taking a copy of his source tree and patching it, and releasing it publically. Now think of some Gov't department. They don't have to use a patch you think would be a good idea for their software, in *their* build tree - but if they also think it's a good idea, they can fold it into their tree. So, software used by the gov't could be open source, but they would, perhaps, prefer a cathedral-ish approach (e.g. gcc, rather than a bazaar model - e.g. all the little applets that make up gnome-* or kde-*). Thus, I'd say open-source would be ESPECIALLY good for critcal systems, since there'd be the benefit of what is effectively massive peer review. The motivation would be there for third party contributors, who have a definite interest in a smoothly running system.
The iPAQ palmtop has a 200MHz processor and 64MByte RAM. That's higher powered than my last PC, and much faster than my good ol' Amiga (which is still in active service)
I would contend that the tech is there, now, the distinction has blurred, and the tech is likely to be based on the processor in an iPAQ, which is a pretty popular CPU.
Linux is just a kernel - you don't/have/ to run all sorts of Server-type stuff on top of it, it's just people normally plonk the entire GNU Suite plus the X Window System on top of it.
I, for one, agree that a full blown server installation of linux is near-pointless on such a machine (unless you want a mobile plug-in unit for a (web-site replacement based) disinformation campaign...imagine a james-bond esque figure leaving the iPAQ behind a table tapped into a spare network socket, hijacking IP packets... the mind boggles)
- But a palmtop-optimised one would be VERY useful - opening an XTerm on my palmtop connecting to a server I'm adminning over my mobile phone (I'm in Ireland, so we've had digital mobile phones for ages), for example.
I kludged VNC onto a (16MHz, 16MByte) Psion Series 5mx a few months ago - and thus actually opened up a full X desktop on my Psion.
This is tremendously useful for all sorts of things (at the time, I was messing with development releases of XFree 4, so each time my gfx card crashed, I just reset it remotely, without having to reboot the rest of the system.)
Since Linux already has all the remote admin infrastructure in place, it'd be great on a palmtop.
Does the Indrema console support the Amiga / Tao Virtual Environment for development? I ask mainly because that would mean that any developers could be assured that their game would run on a variety of systems, and since RedHat bundles the new Amiga SDK.
Probably related: Here in Ireland, the T.V. reception from the Astra T.V. satellites has been abysmal for the past few hours (at least for our receiver...) - maybe the satellites are being slightly fried...
Is there any way to convince CVS to upgrade a decompressed tarball's directory tree? It's annoying when you download a release tarball, want to upgrade from CVS, and then discover that CVS doesn't want to just get changed files, and is instead trying to re-grab the entire tree...
Once I get D3 for Linux, it's bye-bye Windows partition for me! D3 is the last piece of software I've been keeping Windoze around for. This will give me enough space to start playing around with BeOS...
If you're having problems with legibility with your X server, you may well have the DPI set wrongly. It defaults to 75dpi if you don't set it, which is often wrong for modern, high-res screens. (eg. my 15 inch 1280x1024 display is about 120DPI)
Well, actually, the "first principles" are, in some sense, mutable, they're just not mutated very often. There is no "absolute truth". There is "consensual reality" which is the acknowledgement that, to get anything done at all, you have to use roughly the same set of rules as the next person. Otherwise you descend into solipism, and you're then better off talking to a philosopher than a scientist. Anyway, that science is not infallible is no reason to accept any religion's doctrine of infallibility - science doesn't even claim to be infallible, unlike, for example, christianity, judaism or islam... The very fact that there are so many mutually contradictory religions to choose from, all claiming to be the "one true faith" should be a bit of a hint that they're baloney. Science doesn't even try to claim it's the "one true faith", it's not even a faith, any more than zero bananas is a useful amount of bananas.
A religion is based on faith; where faith is belief in an absolute truth without justification. In science, there is NO TRUTH. There are only theorems to be disproved. The scientific method is to continously adapt the "truth of the moment" by experimiental verification. Religious doctrine tends to be *the exact opposite* - faith without proof, trust in a power higher than our own. Why else is innocence venerated? Why was doubting Thomas scorned?
If Troll Tech get bought out, Qt becomes GPL-compatible New-style BSD licensed. If this were to happen, the last valid objection other than NIH syndrome that Americans have to Qt/KDE would falter, and Linux would instantly have a very cool, de-facto standard C++ development platform. I would predict that moc would be banished in fairly short order, and a somewhat libsigc++ standrd C++ solution fitted in. surely a large company such as IBM could afford such a buyout.
Please don't lump the Amiga and Atari ST together.
The Amiga was a *very* similar m68k-based unix-like platform to NeXT (except amiga had no true memory protection (big downer that, but it meant that the AmigaOS had near-realtime latencies and could use extremely fast message passing-by-reference to shunt data around.)).
At a fraction of the price, it was just marketed by complete buffoons. CBM management actually managed to screw up a deal for the amiga A3000UX to become the low end Sun (or was it DEC?) workstation, but the Amiga still managed to dominate the video producton industry for a decade, despite CBM marketing's repeated attempts to sell it as a "games computer" in toy stores.
The Amiga division was making a profit even as the parent company folded, but blithering-idiot CBM management continously pumped money out of amiga R&D and into marketing their over-hyped, under-specced CBM PC line.
There's still features from AmigaOS I miss on Linux, mainly to do with the way the filesystem works (Assigns and Device handlers to let you cd into TCP connections, shell archives, windows and the like), the extra "screen" layer of UI abstraction that Enlightenment tries to emulate (the Rasterman is an ex-Amiga hacker), the system-wide REXX scripting, the way applications didn't spread themselves across about 10 different directories, and a load of other little niggling things, many of which are available as patches and add-ons into Linux, but on the Amiga, they all worked together seamlessly.
The same can not really be said of the ST.
The ST was kludged together from off-the-shelf parts in a cynical business decision by Atari, after CBM bought Amiga out from under their noses.
There's a quite interesting couple of pre-prints in the arXiv dealing, in part, with the similarities between quantum logic (not quite the same thing as quantum computing) and cognition. (And don't forget that pre-prints can range from pure nonsense to wonderful - I'm not clever enough to tell where these particular ones lie on that spectrum)
arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007044 - We show how Bell inequalities can be violated in cognition, specifically in the relationship between abstract concepts and specific instances of these concepts. This supports the hypothesis that genuine quantum structure exists in the mind.
To even vaguely understand the above, you'll need to read: arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007041 Why the Disjunction in Quantum Logic is Not Classical
The amiga had a keyboard, there were professional development environments available for it, professional quality art packages. Almost everyone had Deluxe Paint, a fairly large number had AMOS if not DevPAC or SAS/C. Lots had octamed. All creative tools. Unlike the brain rotting consoles of today, the amiga afforded you the opportunity to *learn* about the system. Like Linux does today. I think this is where Windows does the most harm -
If you've ever read Windows documentation, MS does it's best to stop you getting past a certain level of expertise. With Linux you get the feeling you could keep learning until you know everything there is to know about the system, even if that would take you forever in real terms. In windows, you just don't get that feeling, and games consoles are even worse.
A complete newbie sitting down in front of a windows box has a high probability of turning into a drooling idiot, in computing terms. He'll get "stuck in a rut" of MS-isms.
A complete newbie [NOTE: Not someone who has ever used windows before - they are not computing newbies. To use linux you have to unlearn some of your windows habits, such as multiple filesystem roots C: D: E: etc, and continual effective root access] sitting down in front of a modern linux box (a)won't find it any harder to use than windows (I've had the opportunity of testing this with a cousin, who used linux first, and subsequently found windows clunky and illogical...), and (b) can keep learning about the system, and never gets the feelng the computer is acting randomly.
There's a famous line about BASIC damaging the minds of aspiring computer programmers forever. A similar line applies to Windows - After learning windows, bad habits become engrained, making it harder to move to a different platform than for a complete newbie. I'm sure MS does this deliberately.
About the only thing the forthcoming new Amiga has in common with the old "classic" Amiga is the name. If you read up on the Amiga and Tao, you'll see the new Amiga is quite innovative - a generalised virtual machine and operating system that dynamically recompiles for the target architecture, using optimising compilers running within the virtual machine (currently supported languages are C, C++, Java, and assembler for the virtual machine). Sort of Transmeta-Crusoe-backwards. I also suspect the Tao Virtual Processor machine code will turn out to be quite similar to Crusoe native code, but that's just a hunch.
You may have seen the recent slashdot articles connected to Tao, such as the one about heterogenous multiprocessing CPU cores on a single die, with each core at least semi-automagically executing the parts of a Tao/Amiga application that it is best suited for.
Problem is, the mandrake kernel is relatively heavily patched, and you need to be sufficiently with it to apply all the extra patches yourself (such as supermount) if you don't want to lose functionality when compiling from a different source tree. Mdk Initscripts also make a stab at detecting what features you've compiled in, and disable various things based on support - whcih means that you're more likely to be able to boot successfully, but a novice user who manages to recompile from a virgin kernel tarball will be left wondering, for example, why he can't mount floppies just by clicking on them anymore...
Because the cool bit isn't really the multiple-cpu cores-on-die, the cool bit is the way they tie the processors together. Basically, they can throw chips specialised for different tasks, with different instruction sets, and different strengths and weaknesses together, and the Tao/Amiga system will take advantage of all of them according to their strengths, and dynamically recompile your application for them, and each thread will run on an appropriate processor i.e. a sound fx intensive thread onto a DSP core, 3D graphics onto a vector core, etc. And you don't need to know the nitty-gritty details, just write code in the language of your choice (Java, C, C++ and VP asm are the current possibilities) for a virtual machine.
If you remember the original "classic" amiga from 1985, its design philosphy was not to run everything on the CPU, but to slap task-specific (but programmable) co-processors in to do various tasks extremely quickly, with their own DMA to the unified memory pool. This was coupled to an OS that used message-passing by reference, which meant that there was no memory copy overhead in interprocess communication (and unfortunately also meant that proper interprocess memory protection was impossible - i.e. there's no distinction between threads and processes on a "classic" Amiga), which is why the Amiga, at the time, could wipe the floor with any other system (and often well above) its price range in terms of simultaneous graphics and sound data throughput. (later to be termed "multimedia"). It also made programming the system... interesting...
Really high-performance stuff tended to mean stepping outside the OS - while the OS was cool in other ways, it didn't expose the full power of the hardware architecture.
The Tao VP technology makes programming a heterogenous multiprocessing environment (relatively) easy - the software design concepts have caught up with the hardware design concepts. It's probably no coincidence that the developers behind Tao were once Amiga programmers, who had to bend their minds around usng the 68000, copper, blitter, sound and disk IO processors all at once.
It now becomes increasingly clear that the new Amiga will, indeed, be "in the spirit of the 'classic' Amiga", just like Amiga Inc. have been saying all along, and will also be, like the original Amiga, technologically advanced copared to its peers. Of course, both the hardware and software will be astronomically more advanced than the amiga's set of custom chips (the "PAD" - for Paula, Agnus,Denise - Amiga custom chips were traditionally given women's names (and the motherboards B-52 album names))
It remains to be seen whether managment can screw it up as thoroughly as the original Amiga.:-(
My major worry is some parts of the system are a tad more proprietary than people are used to these days in the Open Source world, including the multitudes of ex-Amiga users who have changed over to Linux.
You probably mean a "bat" - a "flying" mouse that gives 3-d feedback, usually by radio or ultrasound.
They've been available at leat since the late eighties, actually. I remember one for the Amiga, back in the days when the Amiga ruled for gfx work. They never really caught on because of "gorilla arm" syndrome - the human body rapidly grows tired of holding the damn thing up. The same trouble afflicted light pens - using a pen with your arm outstretched to a vertical monitor screen really pissed people off after a while. We've seen a resurgence in popularity of pen-like devices with the advent of cheap lcd screens on palmtops, which are often held near-horizontally.
(Question: why didn't the light-penners turn their monitors so that the screen was pointing upwards? Do monitors not work that way up, or something?)
Also, the only sensible way for you to stop someone taking your work, in the absence of copyright, is not to release it.
Once you release it, in the absence of copyright, you shouldn't be surprised if someone copies it (if it's any good), and there would be nothing you can do about it, thus, you have no "natural right" to stop people copying it. If people can take it, then in the absence of a legal framework, they have a "natural right" (i.e. ability) to make a copy of it - i.e. they can. It is this right that copyright restricts. Remember, they are not taking something from you (since that would leave you with less), they are copying.
Think about it. In the absence of copyright,all you really have is the power to decide whether to release/make something or not. Once you do that, you have no say if people can copy it. If it's a physical object, you can certainly stop people *taking* it, but taking isn't the same as copying, is it?
Remember, copyright violation isn't exactly theft (although it may be artificially defined to be). Why? You still have the work, whatever it may be, even if I copy it.
The concept of "taking == copying" you express in your post is thus inappropriate in the absence of copyright framework to give this concept any weight... so your argument is circular.
Note that I'm not against copyright per se,This comment I made some time ago expresses my opinion - basically, copyright as a concept isn't too bad, but the current system has been perverted to the needs of corporations rather than the artists and society (e.g. American copyright can now last significantly longer than the average human lifespan. This is hardly in the interest of the artist, but is certainly in the interest of corporations with an indefinite lifespan, e.g. Disney).
As far as I can tell, you've kinda got it backwards. You're correct to say that "rights" are societal constructs. However:
You have no intrinsic right to STOP people copying your work ad infinitum. (except by what means you have within yourself e.g. killing them.) Just as an artificially constructed law against killing people means that members of our society have a "right" to life, a law was invented that gives the creators of a work control over what other members of our society do with the work - the creators are granted an artificially constructed right, "copyright".
For example, the copyright holder of software under the GPL grants any member of the public permission to copy and modify the source code, provided said member of the public releases all modifications under the same restriction if he distrubtes them - thus, the GPL uses copyright law to guarantee source code availability.
The first copyright law I've ever heard of:
The Cathach, or the "Battle Book" is the oldest surviving Irish manuscript psalter. Dating from the middle of the sixth century, only fifty-eight leaves survive.
A copy of this psalter, known as the Battle Book of the Clan O'Donnell- kinsmen of Saint Colmcille (or Saint Columba)- was carried into battle to help its owners to victory.
Saint Colmcille was accused of secretly copying The Cathach, the property of his master, Saint Finnian. The celebrated case of the dispute of copyright (possibly the first dispute of copyright) led to High King Dermott's historic judgement, "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy". The O'Donnell's were ordered to return their copy.
Colmcille's disagreement with the verdict resulted in the battle of Culdreimhe, County Sligo, after which Colmcille, in repentance at the bloodshed, exiled himself from his beloved monastery at Derry Colmcille, and sailed to Iona in Scotland from where he lit the fire of Christianity in Britain.
Thus, copyright is an articial right, introduced by a society, that must enforced by some power withiun that society, in this case the High King Dermott and his forces. What has changed is that now, by international treaty, copyright law applies to most of the globe. There is no reason why this could not change in future, in the face of the drastic social restructuring due to the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
And block satellite launchers or outlaw dishes, outlaw making little robotic router-fish to swim round the pacific running Freenet nodes, outlaw blimp relays, outlaw nanotech. Pretty soon, you'll have to outlaw everything, right down to carrier pigeons. And you'd have to do it internationally. It'd be madness,and sure, there's a small, but finite chance of that taking place, but it's a VERY samll chance.
I think you're missing the point. My post was talking about a rudimentary versioning system, as well as a trashcan. I don't use a script like that either, but I'm a lot more experienced than, say, my little brother.
An OPTIONAL trashcan would be a conceptual crutch that might make the novice a little more comfortable, while not getting in the way of real work. Combined with a version history, it could be quite useful.
The other implicit point which you didn't pick up on was that it'd be "the unix way" of happy little component tools chained together in user space to acheive the same end as some grandiose plan for a new filesystem.
It's been said before but anyway:
/var/trash, cloning the directory hierarchy as it goes (i.e. /var/trash/usr/ etc.)? If you want to be smart, make it deal with different types of files appropriately, and make sure that's it's got correct permission control. Then just train yourself to type "gb" instead of "rm", unless you really mean it. Schedule a cron job to delete the contents periodically, and/or make a script "emptytrash" that rm -rf /var/trash/*
/var/trash.n/ where n is the n-th previous "gb", so that each time you delete, it gets versioned out. The interaction could go, say:
/home/david/pants
/var/trash/home/david/pants
/home/david/pants
/var/trash/home/david/pants
/var/trash.1/home/david/pants
How about making "gb" (garbage) or something a short script that moves files to a trashcan location, say
It would be fairly trivial to extend this to
$ echo "Jeans" >/home/david/pants
$ gb
pants trashed.
$ more
Jeans
$ echo "Baggy" >/home/david/pants
$ gb
pants trashed.
$more
Baggy
$more
Jeans
Have a ugb command to reverse the delete.
Yes, the idea needs work, and sounds space wasting, but HD space is cheap these days.
Finely ground pepper does tend to make me sneeze, if I inhale it gently. The pepper must be fine enough to float in the air, though, like a little dust cloud. Most pepper grinders produce far coarser particles.
In my experience, the sneeze effect of inhaled pepper dust floating in the air is comparable to that of inhaled mustard flour floating similarly, and far greater than that of chalk dust.
Just because something is open-source, doesn't mean that the Gov't *has* to use patches from J. Random Coder in its "official" tree. There's a spectrum of open source-ish licenses, but they have (at least) two important aspects in this discussion.
Disclosure of source:
You're taxes are paying for this stuff, remember, so you [should] have a right to see how the entire system works. There are several examples of disclosed-source proprietary licenses, which might be a middle ground for a government-mandated source disclosure programme and a rabidly anti-sharing anti-caring american-typical oligopolistic corporation.
Provision for forking/patching of source:
Your taxes have paid for this stuff, so you should be able to use the source. If you REALLY want to, you should be free to start your own tree based on the theirs, or, when you are using the code, apply you own patches. At the same time, that does not mean that the Gov't should necessarily incorporate every patch into its own source tree. e.g. Linus doesn't have to accept Linux patches from you, but, thanks to the GPL, he can't stop you taking a copy of his source tree and patching it, and releasing it publically. Now think of some Gov't department. They don't have to use a patch you think would be a good idea for their software, in *their* build tree - but if they also think it's a good idea, they can fold it into their tree. So, software used by the gov't could be open source, but they would, perhaps, prefer a cathedral-ish approach (e.g. gcc, rather than a bazaar model - e.g. all the little applets that make up gnome-* or kde-*). Thus, I'd say open-source would be ESPECIALLY good for critcal systems, since there'd be the benefit of what is effectively massive peer review. The motivation would be there for third party contributors, who have a definite interest in a smoothly running system.
The iPAQ palmtop has a 200MHz processor and 64MByte RAM. That's higher powered than my last PC, and much faster than my good ol' Amiga (which is still in active service)
/have/ to run all sorts of Server-type stuff on top of it, it's just people normally plonk the entire GNU Suite plus the X Window System on top of it.
I would contend that the tech is there, now, the distinction has blurred, and the tech is likely to be based on the processor in an iPAQ, which is a pretty popular CPU.
Linux is just a kernel - you don't
I, for one, agree that a full blown server installation of linux is near-pointless on such a machine (unless you want a mobile plug-in unit for a (web-site replacement based) disinformation campaign...imagine a james-bond esque figure leaving the iPAQ behind a table tapped into a spare network socket, hijacking IP packets... the mind boggles)
- But a palmtop-optimised one would be VERY useful - opening an XTerm on my palmtop connecting to a server I'm adminning over my mobile phone (I'm in Ireland, so we've had digital mobile phones for ages), for example.
I kludged VNC onto a (16MHz, 16MByte) Psion Series 5mx a few months ago - and thus actually opened up a full X desktop on my Psion.
This is tremendously useful for all sorts of things (at the time, I was messing with development releases of XFree 4, so each time my gfx card crashed, I just reset it remotely, without having to reboot the rest of the system.)
Since Linux already has all the remote admin infrastructure in place, it'd be great on a palmtop.
Does the Indrema console support the Amiga / Tao Virtual Environment for development? I ask mainly because that would mean that any developers could be assured that their game would run on a variety of systems, and since RedHat bundles the new Amiga SDK.
Probably related: Here in Ireland, the T.V. reception from the Astra T.V. satellites has been abysmal for the past few hours (at least for our receiver...) - maybe the satellites are being slightly fried...
Is there any way to convince CVS to upgrade a decompressed tarball's directory tree? It's annoying when you download a release tarball, want to upgrade from CVS, and then discover that CVS doesn't want to just get changed files, and is instead trying to re-grab the entire tree...
Now that Qt is GPL, and templates are working in gcc, there is an excellent chance that MOC will go the way of the dinosaur...
Once I get D3 for Linux, it's bye-bye Windows partition for me! D3 is the last piece of software I've been keeping Windoze around for. This will give me enough space to start playing around with BeOS...
I wonder is the level editor ported too...
If you're having problems with legibility with your X server, you may well have the DPI set wrongly. It defaults to 75dpi if you don't set it, which is often wrong for modern, high-res screens. (eg. my 15 inch 1280x1024 display is about 120DPI)
See the tip on linux.com about it.
Make sure to read the comment by Andreas Plesch on the tip as well, as a better method for setting the DPI is given than the original suggestion.
There's a psion port of a cut-down doom. www.palmtop.nl/encore.html
Well, actually, the "first principles" are, in some sense, mutable, they're just not mutated very often. There is no "absolute truth". There is "consensual reality" which is the acknowledgement that, to get anything done at all, you have to use roughly the same set of rules as the next person. Otherwise you descend into solipism, and you're then better off talking to a philosopher than a scientist. Anyway, that science is not infallible is no reason to accept any religion's doctrine of infallibility - science doesn't even claim to be infallible, unlike, for example, christianity, judaism or islam... The very fact that there are so many mutually contradictory religions to choose from, all claiming to be the "one true faith" should be a bit of a hint that they're baloney. Science doesn't even try to claim it's the "one true faith", it's not even a faith, any more than zero bananas is a useful amount of bananas.
A religion is based on faith; where faith is belief in an absolute truth without justification. In science, there is NO TRUTH. There are only theorems to be disproved. The scientific method is to continously adapt the "truth of the moment" by experimiental verification. Religious doctrine tends to be *the exact opposite* - faith without proof, trust in a power higher than our own. Why else is innocence venerated? Why was doubting Thomas scorned?
Please see www.infidels.org for some though-provoking essays.
If Troll Tech get bought out, Qt becomes GPL-compatible New-style BSD licensed. If this were to happen, the last valid objection other than NIH syndrome that Americans have to Qt/KDE would falter, and Linux would instantly have a very cool, de-facto standard C++ development platform. I would predict that moc would be banished in fairly short order, and a somewhat libsigc++ standrd C++ solution fitted in. surely a large company such as IBM could afford such a buyout.
Please don't lump the Amiga and Atari ST together.
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The Amiga was a *very* similar m68k-based unix-like platform to NeXT (except amiga had no true memory protection (big downer that, but it meant that the AmigaOS had near-realtime latencies and could use extremely fast message passing-by-reference to shunt data around.)).
At a fraction of the price, it was just marketed by complete buffoons. CBM management actually managed to screw up a deal for the amiga A3000UX to become the low end Sun (or was it DEC?) workstation, but the Amiga still managed to dominate the video producton industry for a decade, despite CBM marketing's repeated attempts to sell it as a "games computer" in toy stores.
The Amiga division was making a profit even as the parent company folded, but blithering-idiot CBM management continously pumped money out of amiga R&D and into marketing their over-hyped, under-specced CBM PC line.
There's still features from AmigaOS I miss on Linux, mainly to do with the way the filesystem works (Assigns and Device handlers to let you cd into TCP connections, shell archives, windows and the like), the extra "screen" layer of UI abstraction that Enlightenment tries to emulate (the Rasterman is an ex-Amiga hacker), the system-wide REXX scripting, the way applications didn't spread themselves across about 10 different directories, and a load of other little niggling things, many of which are available as patches and add-ons into Linux, but on the Amiga, they all worked together seamlessly.
The same can not really be said of the ST.
The ST was kludged together from off-the-shelf parts in a cynical business decision by Atari, after CBM bought Amiga out from under their noses.
Please see www.blizzard.u-net.com/AtoZ/history
for a history of the amiga, www.amiga.org for amiga news, and www.amiga.com for information about the Tao/Amiga Virtual Processor technology.
There's a quite interesting couple of pre-prints in the arXiv dealing, in part, with the similarities between quantum logic (not quite the same thing as quantum computing) and cognition. (And don't forget that pre-prints can range from pure nonsense to wonderful - I'm not clever enough to tell where these particular ones lie on that spectrum)
arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007044 - We show how Bell inequalities can be violated in cognition, specifically in the relationship between abstract concepts and specific instances of these concepts. This supports the hypothesis that genuine quantum structure exists in the mind.
To even vaguely understand the above, you'll need to read:
arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007041 Why the Disjunction in Quantum Logic is Not Classical
The amiga had a keyboard, there were professional development environments available for it, professional quality art packages. Almost everyone had Deluxe Paint, a fairly large number had AMOS if not DevPAC or SAS/C. Lots had octamed. All creative tools. Unlike the brain rotting consoles of today, the amiga afforded you the opportunity to *learn* about the system. Like Linux does today. I think this is where Windows does the most harm -
If you've ever read Windows documentation, MS does it's best to stop you getting past a certain level of expertise. With Linux you get the feeling you could keep learning until you know everything there is to know about the system, even if that would take you forever in real terms. In windows, you just don't get that feeling, and games consoles are even worse.
A complete newbie sitting down in front of a windows box has a high probability of turning into a drooling idiot, in computing terms. He'll get "stuck in a rut" of MS-isms.
A complete newbie [NOTE: Not someone who has ever used windows before - they are not computing newbies. To use linux you have to unlearn some of your windows habits, such as multiple filesystem roots C: D: E: etc, and continual effective root access] sitting down in front of a modern linux box (a)won't find it any harder to use than windows (I've had the opportunity of testing this with a cousin, who used linux first, and subsequently found windows clunky and illogical...), and (b) can keep learning about the system, and never gets the feelng the computer is acting randomly.
There's a famous line about BASIC damaging the minds of aspiring computer programmers forever. A similar line applies to Windows - After learning windows, bad habits become engrained, making it harder to move to a different platform than for a complete newbie. I'm sure MS does this deliberately.
About the only thing the forthcoming new Amiga has in common with the old "classic" Amiga is the name. If you read up on the Amiga and Tao, you'll see the new Amiga is quite innovative - a generalised virtual machine and operating system that dynamically recompiles for the target architecture, using optimising compilers running within the virtual machine (currently supported languages are C, C++, Java, and assembler for the virtual machine).
Sort of Transmeta-Crusoe-backwards. I also suspect the Tao Virtual Processor machine code will turn out to be quite similar to Crusoe native code, but that's just a hunch.
You may have seen the recent slashdot articles connected to Tao, such as the one about heterogenous multiprocessing CPU cores on a single die, with each core at least semi-automagically executing the parts of a Tao/Amiga application that it is best suited for.
Problem is, the mandrake kernel is relatively heavily patched, and you need to be sufficiently with it to apply all the extra patches yourself (such as supermount) if you don't want to lose functionality when compiling from a different source tree. Mdk Initscripts also make a stab at detecting what features you've compiled in, and disable various things based on support - whcih means that you're more likely to be able to boot successfully, but a novice user who manages to recompile from a virgin kernel tarball will be left wondering, for example, why he can't mount floppies just by clicking on them anymore...
Because the cool bit isn't really the multiple-cpu cores-on-die, the cool bit is the way they tie the processors together. Basically, they can throw chips specialised for different tasks, with different instruction sets, and different strengths and weaknesses together, and the Tao/Amiga system will take advantage of all of them according to their strengths, and dynamically recompile your application for them, and each thread will run on an appropriate processor i.e. a sound fx intensive thread onto a DSP core, 3D graphics onto a vector core, etc. And you don't need to know the nitty-gritty details, just write code in the language of your choice (Java, C, C++ and VP asm are the current possibilities) for a virtual machine.
:-(
If you remember the original "classic" amiga from 1985, its design philosphy was not to run everything on the CPU, but to slap task-specific (but programmable) co-processors in to do various tasks extremely quickly, with their own DMA to the unified memory pool. This was coupled to an OS that used message-passing by reference, which meant that there was no memory copy overhead in interprocess communication (and unfortunately also meant that proper interprocess memory protection was impossible - i.e. there's no distinction between threads and processes on a "classic" Amiga), which is why the Amiga, at the time, could wipe the floor with any other system (and often well above) its price range in terms of simultaneous graphics and sound data throughput. (later to be termed "multimedia"). It also made programming the system... interesting...
Really high-performance stuff tended to mean stepping outside the OS - while the OS was cool in other ways, it didn't expose the full power of the hardware architecture.
The Tao VP technology makes programming a heterogenous multiprocessing environment (relatively) easy -
the software design concepts have caught up with the hardware design concepts. It's probably no coincidence that the developers behind Tao were once Amiga programmers, who had to bend their minds around usng the 68000, copper, blitter, sound and disk IO processors all at once.
It now becomes increasingly clear that the new Amiga will, indeed, be "in the spirit of the 'classic' Amiga", just like Amiga Inc. have been saying all along, and will also be, like the original Amiga, technologically advanced copared to its peers. Of course, both the hardware and software will be astronomically more advanced than the amiga's set of custom chips (the "PAD" - for Paula, Agnus,Denise - Amiga custom chips were traditionally given women's names (and the motherboards B-52 album names))
It remains to be seen whether managment can screw it up as thoroughly as the original Amiga.
My major worry is some parts of the system are a tad more proprietary than people are used to these days in the Open Source world, including the multitudes of ex-Amiga users who have changed over to Linux.
You probably mean a "bat" - a "flying" mouse that gives 3-d feedback, usually by radio or ultrasound.
They've been available at leat since the late eighties, actually. I remember one for the Amiga, back in the days when the Amiga ruled for gfx work. They never really caught on because of "gorilla arm" syndrome - the human body rapidly grows tired of holding the damn thing up. The same trouble afflicted light pens - using a pen with your arm outstretched to a vertical monitor screen really pissed people off after a while. We've seen a resurgence in popularity of pen-like devices with the advent of cheap lcd screens on palmtops, which are often held near-horizontally.
(Question: why didn't the light-penners turn their monitors so that the screen was pointing upwards? Do monitors not work that way up, or something?)
Er... I said the right to life was artificial.
Also, the only sensible way for you to stop someone taking your work, in the absence of copyright, is not to release it.
Once you release it, in the absence of copyright, you shouldn't be surprised if someone copies it (if it's any good), and there would be nothing you can do about it, thus, you have no "natural right" to stop people copying it. If people can take it, then in the absence of a legal framework, they have a "natural right" (i.e. ability) to make a copy of it - i.e. they can. It is this right that copyright restricts. Remember, they are not taking something from you (since that would leave you with less), they are copying.
Think about it. In the absence of copyright,all you really have is the power to decide whether to release/make something or not. Once you do that, you have no say if people can copy it. If it's a physical object, you can certainly stop people *taking* it, but taking isn't the same as copying, is it?
Remember, copyright violation isn't exactly theft (although it may be artificially defined to be). Why? You still have the work, whatever it may be, even if I copy it.
The concept of "taking == copying" you express in your post is thus inappropriate in the absence of copyright framework to give this concept any weight... so your argument is circular.
Note that I'm not against copyright per se,This comment I made some time ago expresses my opinion - basically, copyright as a concept isn't too bad, but the current system has been perverted to the needs of corporations rather than the artists and society (e.g. American copyright can now last significantly longer than the average human lifespan. This is hardly in the interest of the artist, but is certainly in the interest of corporations with an indefinite lifespan, e.g. Disney).
As far as I can tell, you've kinda got it backwards. You're correct to say that "rights" are societal constructs. However:
You have no intrinsic right to STOP people copying your work ad infinitum. (except by what means you have within yourself e.g. killing them.) Just as an artificially constructed law against killing people means that members of our society have a "right" to life, a law was invented that gives the creators of a work control over what other members of our society do with the work - the creators are granted an artificially constructed right, "copyright".
For example, the copyright holder of software under the GPL grants any member of the public permission to copy and modify the source code, provided said member of the public releases all modifications under the same restriction if he distrubtes them - thus, the GPL uses copyright law to guarantee source code availability.
The first copyright law I've ever heard of:
The Cathach, or the "Battle Book" is the oldest surviving Irish manuscript psalter. Dating from the middle of the sixth century, only fifty-eight leaves survive.
A copy of this psalter, known as the Battle Book of the Clan O'Donnell- kinsmen of Saint Colmcille (or Saint Columba)- was carried into battle to help its owners to victory.
Saint Colmcille was accused of secretly copying The Cathach, the property of his master, Saint Finnian. The celebrated case of the dispute of copyright (possibly the first dispute of copyright) led to High King Dermott's historic judgement, "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy". The O'Donnell's were ordered to return their copy.
Colmcille's disagreement with the verdict resulted in the battle of Culdreimhe, County Sligo, after which Colmcille, in repentance at the bloodshed, exiled himself from his beloved monastery at Derry Colmcille, and sailed to Iona in Scotland from where he lit the fire of Christianity in Britain.
Thus, copyright is an articial right, introduced by a society, that must enforced by some power withiun that society, in this case the High King Dermott and his forces. What has changed is that now, by international treaty, copyright law applies to most of the globe. There is no reason why this could not change in future, in the face of the drastic social restructuring due to the Internet.